Developing Students’ Intercultural Awareness And Skills

Abstract

This article deals with the issue of developing intercultural awareness and skills of economics students in English lessons.The relevance of the article is caused by the need of elaboration of the topic of the development students’ intercultural communicative skills as the future professionals working globally. As future specialists working in multinational environment students should practice these skills when learning foreign language in business discourse. This article considers the theoretical basis of the notion of cultural awareness and focuses on the cultural awareness approach in foreign languages teaching. The author elaborates on the principles, objectives and steps of developing cultural awareness, giving the students the idea about the cultural diversity. In this article, the author also provides the reader with the features of national mentality of the Russians and the British, as a pattern of the collaboration in business. This article contains the examples aimed to illustrate the developing the students’ intercultural awareness and skills. The author arrives at the conclusion that the future professionals with cultural awareness and skills are able to effectively cooperate with different cultural agents working globally in multinational environment.